Oracle Data Warehouse vs Amazon Redshift

• Able to handle very large data sizes efficiently from a performance, high availability and manageability perspective. This is accomplished through the Oracle Partitioning functionality. Partitioning allows large segments (tables, IOT index-organized tables, indexes) to be broken into smaller segments at the physical layer but treated as a whole at the logical layer.
• Provides support for dual-format architecture through Oracle In-Memory functionality. Without any change to application code one can obtain in-memory performance. This functionality enables us to have the tables represented in both the row format and the column format using in-memory format. This is a huge boost for BI/analytic queries since the Oracle optimizer is able to intelligently choose the appropriate format.
• Provision to materialize a subset of table data or table joins. This is through materialized views and the optimizer will rewrite the query against the base tables to make use of this materialized view. This provides a huge performance boost and is critical in VLDBs as in a data warehouse. The query rewrite is fully transparent to users.
• Provides multiple compression capabilities. This is very useful not only for deducing the storage foot print but as well as increase performance at different layers of the infrastructure including query performance. The compression functionality can be applied against both structured and unstructured data.
• With the advent of Engineered Systems (Exadata, Database Machine, SuperCluster) there are specific features and functionalities that can further boost the Oracle data warehouse. These are related to consolidation, Smart Scan, Storage Indexes, EHCC (Exadata hybrid columnar compression) and much more.
• RAC - Real Application Clusters (with 2 or more nodes) provides functionality for high availability, performance and scaling as the work load increases. The parallelism is provided both within a node and as well as across nodes. If for any reason a node goes down the data warehouse is still available through other nodes and the running queries are transparently failed over to the surviving nodes.

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• [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
• [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
• [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
• [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.

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• Customer support isn't the best out there. We usually have to wait about an hour to get some form of assistance.
• Pricing is a bit higher than many of its competitors such as AWS Redshift.
• Tweaking features requires dedicated staff. Software is fairly advanced. Would be difficult to use for newcomers.

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• We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
• Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
• Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.

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• Very cost effective for large databases.
• Very fast results on simple queries.
• Analytical functionalities are of wide range, which makes it very cost effective.
• For smaller businesses, it might be a great asset.
• Some features are supposed to be bought separately, so one needs to consider this before licensing with Oracle DW.

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• Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
• Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
• Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.

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